Blackout
by Rebecca Pierce
Summary: "It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know."
1. Day 1

**"It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."**

**-Lemony Snicket_, Horseradish: Bitter Truths You can't Avoid _  
**

* * *

**Day 1: 9:00 a.m. local time [Japan]**

"_. . . . And in other news, there seems to be a minor outbreak of the flu spreading through the northwest. As such, doctors urge the public to please follow the recommended guidelines and to allow children who are sick to remain at home to prevent further spread. Should it get worse, please remember to contact-"_

_A slam, and suddenly a hysterical woman runs onto the screen. _

"_IT'S NOT A FLU! IT'S NOT A FLU! WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT COME IN CONTACT WITH THEM!"_

_Three shadows step in from outside the camera's parameter and begin to hold down the woman, the confused anchorman stepping to the side nervously through the tumult and a general commotion arising. _

_She's struggling, eyes wide and bloodshot as both tears and snot run down her frazzled, dirty features openly. _

"_LISTEN TO ME!"_

_The cameraman, sensing the potential of a future news story, focuses in on the screaming brunette who refuses to go down easily between the three crew members. _

"_KILL THEM ON SITE! DO NOT LET THEM TOUCH YOU! FIND A PLACE TO HIDE AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T-"_

_She falls from a merciless punch to the head. _

_The camera pans to the wide eyed anchorman who seems to chuckle nervously. _

_The screen goes dark. _


	2. Day 56

_**"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."**_

**-Joseph Stalin**

* * *

**Day 56: 8:23 a.m. [Tokyo City]**

"_It started out simply enough." _

The streets of Tokyo are empty. Cars lie forgotten, glass shattered, shops abandoned and looted. Trash is everywhere along the streets, corporate buildings looming like sniveling giants.

The silence is deafening.

"_Mother nature wasn't happy."_

She shivers and Renji frowns. Though neither of them had ever been past Karakura Town, many pictures of the heart of Japan had been seen through all sorts of media—all of these teeming with life. And though they are barely in the outskirts of the area, the aura is melancholy, heavy with darkness and prime ground for hollows.

Her grip tightens on the katana strapped to her waist

They continue, eyes roving over the scenery as Rukia readjusts the plastic medical mask over her nose and mouth.

A voice crackles into existence over the ear piece and she winces at the sharp static that catches her off guard.

"How are things? What do you see?"

Violet eyes rove over the scenery from behind a sturdy set of aviators and then back at her partner.

"Nothing. The whole area looks deserted so far, but we haven't made it into the designated point yet."

"_Humans are. . . weak. They like to play God but when it all comes crashing down. . ."_

"Remember: do what you can and get out as soon as possible. Avoid sound as much as you can."

"Understood."

The line went silent.

They continued walking.

"Why can't we just freakin' use a bike or something like the other-"

"Shh!" Rukia hissed, stopping suddenly.

"_It started out like a flu—same symptoms, same everything. Doctors didn't think much of it. But then people started dying. That's when the panic really started."_

"You hear that?"

"_Imagine then, when you're trying to lay your loved one to rest and suddenly you're told you can't see their body or take it to be properly laid to rest. Imagine that while you're arguing with the guy at the hospital a nurse comes running out crying and screaming and holding the bloody stump where her hand used to be."_

It was barely there. A _scritch scritch_ sort of sound almost like someone was reaching for an itch.

"_Imagine you see people running away—and suddenly the husband, son, or brother you had hoped to take is suddenly there, standing and just . . . there. And at first you feel elated, and maybe a bit confused. Mostly confused really, because there's something hanging out of his mouth and his skin is sloughing off with every breath. You can see into his jaw—his mouth isn't open though."_

Renjii makes a hand motion for her to follow him as he lifts Zabimaru.

The fear is thick in the air.

"_You can see parts of him hanging out that shouldn't be. And that's when it hits you."_

The two shinigami continue down the street, picking their way carefully around debris. The sensor on Rukia's cellphone flashes more urgently with each step and she stops for a moment, swinging the device to the left and right to see where she gets the better reading from. Pointing left, she allows Renji to go in front of her—today was his turn to do the rescue.

"_You begin to run. But it's too late. He's seen you and there's nothing you can do now. Even if you get out, many people many hospitals over are facing the same fate—and some of these are spilling onto the streets unchecked."_

The side alley is dark. Cursing under his breath, Renji clicks on his flashlight and allows the strong beam to rove over the space.

Down near the end behind a dumpster, two tiny feet are sticking out.

Swallowing heavily, the redhead begins to move forward before stopping midway there.

She hasn't reacted to the light—that's a good sign.

"_Soul Society held its breath, watching as the world turned on itself. All the shinigami were pulled out of the living world, as well as the substitute and his companions. It was decreed by the Central 46 that what had happened was a human doing and would remain as a human problem—no one was too lift a finger."_

The shinigami steps closer.

"Miyuki?" He asks the tiny feet. They slide back into hiding behind the dumpster.

"_There were three incidences where a shinigami had been bitten while in a gigai. The twelfth division dismissed it as an effect only on the body, and so those that had come into contact with it were left unmonitored. Problems of the human world were too easy for their captain to understand and beneath the realm of his interest."_

Gathering his courage, Renji steps forward and flashes the light over the little girl clutching a teddy bear to her chest, sobbing silently.

"Are you gonna try eating me too?" Letting out a relieved smile, Renji shakes his head and goes to try and lift her. She jerks away from him, letting out a mild, panicked sound. The redhead tries to calm the rising fear in the child's eyes.

From the information Urahara gave them, she would turn nine tomorrow.

"Look we're kind of in a hurry here so if you just come with me we can get you somewhere more-" He makes a grab for her, a mistake he regrets instantly as she screams. Rukia jerks her gaze from the scene to the streets, hoping she won't-

"Renji." She calls suddenly, pulling out her katana.

They just ran out of time.

"_The three shinigami soon earned the captain's interest when they began to transform."_

He dove for the girl, placing a hand over her mouth and scooping her up before running out and away from the shadows that were steadily getting closer.

The girl's cries had attracted them—they would soon begin to converge. Rukia prayed they hadn't gotten the attention of any Runners but didn't try to get her hopes up too much as they continued through the edges of Tokyo City.

"_They weren't exactly Arrancars, but they weren't humans either. When they were captured, it was noted how feeding them both soul material and actual flesh worked—these being were the joining link between the hollows and humans in a beautifully tuned macabre bridge."_

It wasn't until they had gotten away that Renji took a chance to look down at the girl in his arms who had quit struggling.

There was blood on the front of his shirt.

"Shit."

Rukia turned, eyes widening as they stopped and she, without a second thought, ripped the girl from his hands and threw her forward. The way the child stumbled and fell nearly broke her resolve as she raised Sode no Shirayuki, bringing it down on Miyuki before she could turn around and witness her own death.

Stabbing her would stop her heart only while the virus spread. It wasn't until the clean arc of the white sword severed her head that the child truly died. Without wasting a moment, the petite shinigami kicked the head over so that she could see the child's face. Turning her blade around, she uncapped the hilt and brought it down on the girl's dirty forehead.

Rukia swallowed back the rising bile in her throat and turned from the body, helping Renji out of his shirt before pulling out a small spray can and showering him in the contents.

This would have to do until they got back.

"_By feeding they could create more, just like hollows. But unlike them, the creatures they created were finely tuned by the power of the zanpaktou. A human would make a zombie—a shinigami, on the other hand, became a nightmare."_

They stood for a moment, breaths loud and shaky as she removed her aviators and violet eyes rose to him.

"We tried." She rasped. And whether it was to convince her or him, she wasn't sure as she turned away, her eyes glassy. "Come on."

This was the third time in the last six days when they had been too late.

"_Before dying, the three managed to turn six more between them. All were destroyed but one for research. Something had created a link for the virus between the body and soul—if this wasn't found, the future chances of a repeat situation were off the grid. Kurotsuchi had now found the challenge he so delighted in."_

They ran. Looking up, Rukia tracked the sun on its path and mentally swore. The sun would hit hardest soon—the infected would be at their peak frenzy for food. The light, it seemed, did that to them.

"Hurry." She urged her partner over a shoulder.

"_It wasn't long before Sereitei became aware of how heavily offset the balance between us, the Hollow World, and the world of the living had become. There were no humans 'dying.' This meant that should a member of the dead pass on, chances of survival were slim to none. Not to mention that any member of the living world that did pass had potential of carrying the virus to the dead."_

They could make it. If they ran fast enough, they could make it to the little shack that lay within the mile mark from Tokyo City. If they could just make it there without attracting attention, they could spend the night and travel by dawn towards Urahara's shop.

Or maybe he would send them back into the city again.

"_The hollow world took the worst hit. A treaty was hastily formed between their new leader, Tia Hallibel and Captain-commander Yamamoto to purge the place and shut as many entryways to the human world as possible. The task took many higher hollow rank and even a few shinigami to complete, but completed it was."_

He could see it. It was a rickety looking shack of a place with boarded windows and a large backyard full of thin, yellow grass. Nudging Rukia, he grinned down at her widely in relief before he started looking back up again and noted three figures standing around the area.

"Fuck, man. Can't catch a break, can we?" Unsheathing Zabimaru, it didn't take any prompting for his partner to do the same.

There was one of the figures standing farther away—he was the first to notice them.

"Runner." Rukia hissed, grip tensing around her blade. "I hate these bastards."

By the time the other two had become alerted as well, the first was in a full sprint towards them.

"_Things seemed to slow down for one sacred week. It was then that Yamamoto decided to send in three shinigami teams to scout out the world and find as many survivors as they could. Even with the worlds closed off to each other, the balance was still teetering dangerously. "_

Even by shinigami standards, runners were quick. Theory had it, last Rukia had heard, that they were actually humans who had been blessed with more than normal amounts of reiatsu. In other days they might've been mediums or ghost hunters, but now they were reduced to mounds of flesh on bone with no other thought than an insatiable hunger.

Running towards it as it leapt, Rukia allowed herself to fall onto her knees as she brought up Sode no Shirayuki into its' torso. Picking herself up quickly, she turned and saw her handiwork, noting how even though the body had been severed in half, both ends were still moving. Scowling, she took Sode no Shirayuki and decapitated the top half much like she had done to the child before. Behind her, Renji did the same to the two others at his feet.

The bottom half of her victim would stop writhing eventually—they all did.

"_Two of the teams lost contact within the first week. The last. . ."_

"Come on." Rukia said, swallowing. "Let's catch some sleep while we can."

"_Well, you see, we __**are**__ the last."_


	3. Day 59

_"**I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white."**_

**-Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South**

* * *

**Day 59: 4:30 a.m. [Outskirts of Tokyo]  
**

_"Crossing over is like making a deal with the devil himself." _

She's sick to her stomach. Renji turns away as she bends in half and heaves what little breakfast she'd had behind the house. Whether it was the constant lack of sleep, nightmares, or both, he doesn't know.

They'd grown used to not asking.

_"Once you've done it, you can't go back. We had made a pact to protect the balance at any cost and like good little soldiers, we answered to the beckon of death."_

The dawn had come too fast, the dead too swiftly, and yet still Rukia wipes her mouth, spits into the dirt, and shakes the rankling feeling from her limbs before straightening.

"You going to be-"

"Let's go." She interrupts, shoving past him and walking at a resolute pace.

_"We came, wide eyed and naïve, resolute in our beliefs and morality. We were the balance-there was no way our ideals and good intentions could fail us." _

Urahara had told them to head back. With the radar picking up nothing alive in the area, Rukia and Renji had no choice but to obey. If anything, they'd just scout for supplies in the buildings they'd passed on the way to the safe house to take with them. Even with Urahara growing food and as self-sufficient as they could be, sometimes they needed things that he couldn't create quite at the scale that they needed—first aid kits, toothpaste, clothing, and the like.

Up ahead, Renji pays little attention to the sign placed in the doorway of a small diner.

**HELP**, it reads in thick, sharp strokes of black spray paint.

Rukia glances at it and continues on, unsheathing two small knives strapped onto the thick belt around her waist—the place is too tight between scattered debris and tables for her to cleanly swing a katana.

Diner, tiny and even probably before the outbreak falling apart. There's cracks in the paint and grime on the corners of the few windows that had not suffered the wrath of the desperate masses, grease clinging thick to the metal surfaces of the appliances as they pass carefully deeper into the bowels of the hollow building.

They were probably dead by now- whoever had put that sign- and that meant company.

_"Until they did."_

Renji swears heavily and recoils back, raising the scarf around his neck to cover his nose. Rukia glances down at the area before his feet and notes the pattern of brown splatter as she raises her paper medical mask. It won't do much for the smell but its better than nothing. How it hadn't hit them before this, she doesn't really know until she looks back up and sees the door lying open on its' hinges hidden behind some racks of stacked supplies.

"Two." Renji says simply, giving the open freezer a wide berth.

Rukia stops before the appliance, fighting down the urge to once again relieve her stomach of its contents. Inside are two people decorated in stains of brown and she doesn't even bother looking at the food containers behind them.

Everything would be contaminated by now, judging by the sight of the last scuffle within. There's a frozen look of horror on both their faces and it doesn't take her long to figure out what had happened.

She could almost see it in her head—two men fighting, desperate and driven mad with hunger. One of them manages to kill the other-

She winces at the sickening crunch of the metal bat meeting a skull her mind provides to fill in the death of the first-

-and the second, realizing what he's done. . .

A shot rings loud and clear in her mind and she does then physically jump, pulling away finally from the scene.

_"After that it all quickly falls apart around you. Hope wanes faster than anything when you see the potential in humans disintegrate before your very eyes. The bad get worse and the good either become bad or are killed by them."_

They gather whatever they can quickly and make their way out as the sun begins to rapidly lighten the sky around them. They need to find cover before it makes a full appearance, or they'll be caught right at the worse of the cycle.

And then they feel it.

_"Everything falls apart, everything dies. But here? Not quick enough."_

There's a sickening, violent twist of her insides as she jerks her head towards the source of the feeling and Renji comes up beside her.

"They can't." He says suddenly, dread heavy in the words that barely escape his lips. Their fears are confirmed when Urahara's voice comes in sharp over their earpieces, asking about the anomaly.

A portal is opening—a portal from Sereitei.

Rukia doesn't reply—instead she runs.

_"Nowhere near quick enough to quell even an inkling of hope."_

She doesn't know when she drops everything or when Renji and her are accosted anew by the dead. All she knows is that if they don't get to that portal, someone from their world is going to be stuck here, like them.

Somewhere along the line, while going as fast as her legs can take her, Rukia loses Renji. She knows he's following but he's nowhere as quick as her and soon she outruns him in a labyrinth of streets and alleyways.

_"It's a cruelty, hope."_

She sees the telltale glow of an opening gate lighting a window three stories up in one of the buildings ahead of her and she doesn't hesitate to run full speed at the main door, blades making quick work of all the dead that rise to meet her.

A library, she thinks as she manages to slip through the broken barricade and to the front desk, it's a library.

Orienting herself, she finds the main public stairway and begins her trek up to the third floor, stopping only to shove an infected over the railing and ignoring the mass of dead bodies scattered around the area.

She'd find out soon if they were really dead or not.

_"It's there, even when you don't want it."_

The energy was fading. But with its loss came the moan of several infected.

They couldn't physically sense someone from the other side. If they reacted, it was to the light and the energy that had been released by the opening of the gate.

But if they could see someone there, then they weren't exactly fully human to begin with.

_"Especially, I think, when you don't want it."_

Her breaths were ragged from running so much but she wove through the shelves upon shelves of book on the third open floor with practiced ease, eyes hungrily taking in every bit she could and pleading with someone, _anyone_ that the feeling that her and Renji had was wrong.

She supplicated, with who she wasn't sure. The paper mask came up to cover her face as she continued searching between shelves for a sign that whoever had crossed was still alive.

And then she found it.

A group of infected cornering someone—she couldn't see who, but to her that didn't matter.

Uncapping the ends of the short hilts on her small knives, she counted the infected as she ran headlong into the fray. Seven, by the looks of it, with one behemoth of a man already almost to their victim.

Hesitation doesn't even stutter her breath as she begins an incantation—she'd never reach her fellow shinigami in time.

"SOREN SOKATSUI!"

She watches several of the dead begin degrading from the sheer power of the blast that blooms before her hands and ignores the sudden onslaught of Renji's insults in her earpiece. Surely by now several infected would be on their way from neighboring buildings too due to their sensing of the spirit energy.

Everything came with a price.

_"And definitely when you've learned to begin making due without it."_

Her work is swift after that, making sure to flip the blades and stamp the bodies she could reach. As for the ones she'd burned, there was no hope for those now—she'd taken too long with the remaining ones to be able to lock the souls into the bodies.

She's straddling one—the last one—making the final imprint on its forehead before letting its' head fall back to the floor with a thump. Her eyes rise then to the prone figure before her.

"Your team?" He asks of her.

Rising, she remains silent for a moment as she studies him.

_"That's why you don't make connections—you just don't. That buddy of yours? Yeah, you could be fighting him off in the next five minutes."_

"Bitten?"

"No." He answers just as quickly. Flipping one of the blades, she holds out the handle for him.

"I'm-"

"I know who you are." She responds. "Follow me. . . please." She adds as an afterthought.

He looks at her then, cerulean eyes narrowed in suspicion as he scowls at her. She's not fazed in the slightest.

_"Just don't. Live by that one rule and you'll make it."_

Already the moans of more infected begin to fill the building.

"Mute your reiatsu, don't make a sound. Noise catches their attention, but nowhere near as much as light. Stick close and don't believe anyone who approaches us unless I do so first. Don't use any incantations or your blade as anything other than a physical weapon. Aim for the head or spine. Place the seal on as many as you can after you finish them."

_"I wish I realized it sooner."_

They both look down to the main floor where many infected are beginning to wander out of the shadows. There's so many that the front desk looks like an island in a moving sea of muddy decay.

The young man beside her says nothing. His bright eyes, clever and sharp, count in a rapid fire way the many moving bodies and note the slim pickings of escape.

The way his grip tightens on the blade in his hand says it all.

_"You are a soldier, a machine. You continue until your soul is burned to ash and your body lies in ruins. Until then, run."_

"Captain Hitsugaya?" She says, raising an open hand to him. He takes it cautiously and she squeezes his loose grip in urgency. "RUN!"

_"No matter what, run."_


End file.
